Hotels are one of the oldest and most common forms of business enterprise in rural Saskatchewan. The fact that Saskatchewan’s tenacious old hotels still stand on the corners of Railway and Main is a testament to the determination of the people who have owned and operated them over the past 100 years - and to the fact that they haven't burned down!

Sunday, 27 February 2011

Royal George Hotel in Luseland, 1946. Bertrand G. Brown photograph, Western Development Museum

Sixty-two years -- must be a record for hotel ownership!

After a difficult delivery, the Royal George Hotel in Luseland has had a long and successful life. When it was first built in 1911, it immediately burned down. The owners, Smith and Gardner, sold their holdings in the hotel to William Engelbrecht. According to the first issue [1911] of the Luseland Despatch, “the townspeople were much relieved when the final arrangements were made public as the need of a good hotel at this point is most urgent, the only public-sleeping quarters being bunkhouses. A full force of men will be put to work at lathing the building Monday. As soon as the first floor is completed the plasterers will follow and then the finishers and, should no unlooked-for delay occur, the hotel will open February 1st [1912].”

Dennis and Margaret Ryan, 1910

In 1915, Dennis Ryan and his wife Margaret began what would turn out to be a 62-year-long run of Ryan family management of the Royal George Hotel. Born in Ontario, Dennis worked for a time in the hotel at Scott, Saskatchewan, where he met and married Margaret in 1910. The couple homesteaded for a few years before they and their two little daughters moved to Luseland and bought the Royal George Hotel. “The hotel was a haven for many bachelors,” the Luseland history book recounts. “Maggie tried to cater to them as much as possible whether it be a stack of pancakes, a crisp dandelion salad or fresh doughnuts for the priests that stayed there because there was no Roman Catholic church or rectory in town. The first masses were held in a room upstairs.” Three Ryan children were born in the hotel – Laurence in 1917, Albert in 1918, and Leo in 1923.

Operating the hotel in those days was a 24-hour-a-day, 365-days-a-year job. The ‘Dirty Thirties’ were especially difficult at the Royal George. “The dust blew so hard that it was necessary to spread wet cloths on the window sill to try to keep it out," Kay Ryan Heffner recalls. "It was also a chore to keep all the lamp globes clean and the wicks trimmed to provide light for all the rooms. In the winter it was a full time job to keep all the stoves going to keep all three floors even moderately warm. When the coal stoker was installed and the boiler provided steam heat to all the floors, conditions were much more comfortable.” Dennis Ryan passed away in 1936, and his widow Margaret continued to run the hotel. All the Ryan boys went off to war in the 1940s, leaving one of their sisters to help their mother look after the hotel operations. When Leo returned from his stint in the Navy, he worked for his mother until 1950 when he and his wife Kay took over the Luseland hotel.

Leo and Kay Ryan, 1949. Luseland Hub and Spokes (1983)

The 1950s brought new prosperity to the Ryans and the Royal George Hotel. The Saskatchewan oil boom and pipeline operations were in full swing. Unfortunately, it was not until 1955 that flush toilets, sinks, showers and bathrooms were installed in the hotel. Before that, each room was provided with a basin, a pitcher, and “a slop jar.” In 1952, the Ryans purchased the first clothes dryer in Luseland which made drying the hotel sheets a lot easier. The average cost of a single room at the Royal George Hotel was $2. “ This was not very profitable when, say on July 1 a ‘cowboy’ would rent a room for $2, invite two dozen more friends to join him and make a big mess,” Leo Ryan’s wife recalls. “Needless to say the yearly stampede was not looked on with joy.” Hunting season was also a busy time for the hotel – every room would be full.

In 1960 the hotel industry in Saskatchewan underwent a big change. Women were allowed to enter hotel beverage rooms “making the atmosphere much more pleasant for both guests and workers,” in Kay’s opinion. At this time women started working in the beverage room and Kay was able to help there, too. Leo Ryan passed away in 1977, and the Luseland hotel was bought by Hopfner Holdings. Thus ended the Ryan family reign at the Royal George Hotel. In 1995, Luseland’s old hotel had to be shut down for five months to repair damage done by a fire. Today,the hotel still operates with eight semi-modern rooms available on a daily or monthly basis for $18 per night.

Royal George Hotel, Luseland, 2010. Courtesy of Gregory Melle

Watch video showing the town of Luseland, misspelled "Luceland," August 2009, including the hotel (20 seconds in): YouTube link

Swan Carlson and his wife Emma moved the Preeceville in 1911 and set up a soda fountain and restaurant. After their business was destroyed by fire in December 1914, Swan decided to buy the Golden West Hotel. The three-storey hotel had been built in 1912 by Scott Rattray. The Carlsons operated the Golden West until 1917. A few other owners followed.

Swan and Emma Carlson, n.d. Lines of the Past (1982)

In 1929, the Oscar Mattison family bought the Golden West Hotel for $5000. For about a year and half, the Mattisons managed to meet the payments on the hotel. Then the Depression of the 1930s took its toll, and for many years the owners were only able to pay the interest and taxes. To help make ends meet, Mrs. Mattison made all the bread for the hotel. She also kept a couple of cows for milk until about 1938. The Mattison family continued to operate the Golden West Hotel until 1968.

Roger and Shannon Prestie have been the owners of this venerable Preeceville hotel since 1991. In January, 2001, Shannon Prestie was recognized by the Stanford Who’s Who, an elite organization of selected executives, professionals and entrepreneurs from around the world, as a leading professional for her work in the hospitality industry. The press release reads: “As owner of Golden West Hotel for the past 21 years, Shannon has consistently demonstrated the vision, dedication and diligence necessary to be successful in the business world. It is the only historical business in the [Preeceville] area operating as it was originally built. The establishment has a tavern that serves food and alcohol as well as providing casino machines. The Golden West Hotel is currently undergoing restorations on the hotel rooms. Shannon is responsible for running the operation along with Roger Prestie. She manages the hotel and bar scheduling, accounting, bookkeeping, and ordering. In addition, Shannon oversees the work of three employees. She is a certified Video Lottery Operator and also has National Food and Safety Certification. Shannon is a member of the Saskatchewan Hotels and Hospitality Association. Actively involved in the community, she donates to the local figure skating club and participates in school fundraisers.”

Saturday, 26 February 2011

From July 1, 1915 to 1924, Saskatchewan was dry. With the closure of 406 bars, 38 liquor dealers, and 12 clubs, it was estimated that liquor consumption in the province dropped by ninety percent. The number of convictions for drunkenness dropped from 2,970 cases in 1913 to 434 in 1918. When the bars closed down, however, so did many small-town hotels. “The hotelmen knew that without beverage revenue they could hardly hope to make ends meet,” writes H. G. Bowley in his 1957 history of the Hotels Association of Saskatchewan. “One of the cornerstones of the art of hospitality was to be removed, and they knew the whole structure of their industry would inevitably totter, and perhaps crash.” Indeed, hotels values in the province plummeted. Many hotel businesses never fully recovered from the blow of 1915. It may not be a coincidence that so many hotels burned down during the Prohibition years.

The Lafrenieres.Footsteps in Time: Meota (1980)

The last days of June 1915 before Prohibition came into effect were hectic ones for small-town Saskatchewan hotels. Prior to the closing of the bars on the July 1st deadline, hotel owners were faced with the necessity of disposing of their stocks. There was a great rush to purchase liquor. At the Clarendon Hotel in Gull Lake, “more than one kerosene can, brought to town to be filled with coal oil, found its way home filled with liquid other than coal oil,” the town history (1989) reports. “Rye whiskey sold that afternoon of June 30th at $1.00 per gallon and some sizeable stocks were laid in against the drought.” That same day at the King Edward Hotel in Meota, Edward and Ferris Ann Lafreniere recalled that, prior to closing, “Anxious buyers filled the bar pushing and shoving. Money was thrown and bottles snatched in return. The doors finally closed and Ed and Ferris Ann literally swept the money from the floor with broom and dust pan. The following day the law moved in and destroyed the remaining stocks.”

Closure and arson weren’t the only coping strategies used by Saskatchewan hotel owners when Prohibition hit. CharlesHitts sold the hotel at Griffin. “When the liquor licenses were rescinded it was hard to keep the commercial travelers over the weekends in the small places,” Griffin historian Mable Charlton writes (1967). “Although the menus were as good they went on to bigger places where there was more amusement.” The owner of the Imperial Hotel at Frobisher, John Klaholz, approached the town council in 1920 requesting that the sales of soft drinks, cigars and cigarettes be confined to the hotel to help make it pay – otherwise, he said, he would have to close it. Some hotel owners applied for government grants for the maintenance of public restrooms and reading rooms in their establishments. Unable to operate profitably, the Last Mountain Hotel at Strasbourg established a movie theatre on the second floor. Ice cream parlours often took the place of hotel bars. In 1916, F. A. Wright got a license to operate five pool tables in the Commercial Hotel in Herbert. Two years later, the Commercial Hotel was destroyed by fire.

Bootleg operations flourished in small-town Saskatchewan hotels during Prohibition. The thirsty traveler staying at the Arlington Hotel at Maryfield was usually able to satisfy his wants through the good graces of John Dodds, the proprietor. Dodds was caught on at least two occasions by a provincial liquor inspector, and paid the appropriate fines for his indiscretion.

The Wilkie local history book provides the following account of a suspected bootlegging case at the Empire Hotel. On August 17, 1915, the Royal North West Mounted raided the hotel between 10 a.m. and noon. “In room No. 6, which was occupied by the hotel proprietor [W.H. Smith] and his wife, after a vigorous search was made, 28 bottles of liquor of various descriptions were found, the contents of two of which had been partially consumed. Upon being asked how this exceptionally large ‘private’ stock came to be on the premises, the defendant, during the hearing before Mr. T. A. Dinsley, J. P., stated that she had taken this liquor from the hotel cellars prior to the date upon which intoxicants had to be removed from the premises, July 1st, and had secreted the bottles, unknown to her husband, in her trunk in which they were found. ... The room in which the liquor was found had been occupied exclusively as a private living room during the entire period that her husband had been proprietor of the house and that it had never been used as a guest chamber. … When the police commenced to search the trunk she told them that it only contained linen. When asked why she made this statement, she could give no reason. When asked why she had kept her husband in ignorance of the fact that she had a private stock she stated that had he known he would probably not have allowed her to retain it.” Verdict: Not guilty.

Room with a sink still conveniently located beside the bed, Borden Hotel, 2010. Joan Champ photo

Sink in the room, toilet and bath down the hall. Still, some small-town Saskatchewan hotels have come a long way from the “thunder mug” under the bed. In the days before indoor plumbing, hotel rooms were equipped with chamber pots, wide-mouthed vessels used by the room’s occupants as a toilet during the middle of the night. The container was then covered with a lid or cloth and slid under the bed until the chambermaid retrieved it in the morning. People used to joke that these were traditional baseball hotels - "pitcher" on the dresser, "catcher" under the bed.

Tony Thibaudeau explained how the sanitation system worked at the Macklin Hotel inPrairie views from Eye Hill (1992): “In those days the hotels provided a large wash bowl and a jug of water in each room and a matching chamber pot under the bed, and on each floor there was a sanitary toilet. The chamber maid would change the beds, clean up the rooms, empty her scrub water and the contents of the aforementioned containers into a metal chute that was attached to the fire escape at the back of the hotel with an opening on each floor and had a barrel at the bottom to catch the flow, the contents of the barrel were bailed out with a pail and disposed of in a covered pool down the lane. I was fortunate enough to have this job for 35 cents a week.”

The Golden West Hotel in Preeceville, operated in the 1930s by the Oscar Mattison family, did not get water works installed until the 1940s. “We had a pump in the kitchen to draw water from a cistern. A pail sat under the sink to catch the waste water. Every day pails of water were carried upstairs to fill the large pitchers. Each bedroom was equipped with a wash basin and water pitcher. … The toilet facilities consisted of a commode. It had to be emptied two or three times daily, thoroughly rinsed and sterilized. A septic tank was installed in the back yard. There was a bathtub in the upstairs linen closet for family use only. The water was heated on the kitchen wood stove and carried upstairs.”

During the 1930s at Nipawin, the Avenue Hotel was owned by the Puterbaughs. It had 16 guest rooms, a dining room, kitchen, laundry room, electricity, a wood furnace – and no running water. Instead, there was a cistern pump in the kitchen. Guests were given a pitcher of hot water with their wake-up call (a loud knock on the door) which they then used to fill a porcelain wash bowl sitting on a wash stand. Guests were also supplied with soap, towels and a pitcher filled with cold water.

A circa 1950s guest room at the Imperial Hotel, Sturgis, 2008.

These primitive conditions continued well into the 1940s and into the 1950s at some small-town Saskatchewan hotels. “It is not so many years ago (1940s),” the Wilkie local history book (1988) states, “that you might catch the hotel housekeeper emptying ‘pots’ over the fire escape on the second floor.” In 1948, Mr. and Mrs. Sydney Roitman completely renovated the interior of the Wilkie Hotel. The most modern touches of all were newly installed bathrooms, hot and cold running water, and a septic tank. In his book, To Get the Lights; A Memoir about Rural Electrification in Saskatchewan (2006), Dave Anderson recalls that life on the road in the early 1950s without running water in hotel rooms was more than inconvenient. “It was a hardship,” he writes. “Most municipal roads I travelled on were gravel …so choking dust in our vehicles was routine. … At day’s end it was impossible to get refreshed with a washcloth in the wash basin with a quart of two of cold water from a pitcher in which often floated a dead fly, moth or wayward ant. So the communal tub at the end of the hall, if there was one, shared with 20 or so other guests, was reluctantly used.”

Friday, 25 February 2011

Originally named the Windsor Hotel, the King George Hotel in Melville was built in 1909 by J. N. (Joseph Napoleon?) Pomerleau. The 1916 Canada Census shows that Joseph Pomerleau, age 22, and Antoinette Pomerleau, age 20,(both single) were managing the hotel on Main Street. Twenty-four other people were living at the King George that year, including the cook Won Yee, two waitresses, and two servants. Most of the hotel guests were railway workers.

The hotel's name was changed after the Royal Visit of 1939. That year, over 60,000 people thronged to Melville, population 3,000, to catch a glimpse of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. The visit was to be a ten-minute whistle-stop, but in view of the magnitude of the crowd, organizers agreed to stop for half an hour.

By 2006, the three-storey hotel on Main Street had been through many upgrades and renovations. Stucco had been applied over the brick exterior. The 212-seat Windsor Tavern on the hotel’s main floor was open seven days a week. It had six video lottery terminals (VLTs), a dance floor, a DJ booth, a big screen TV and a Bose sound system valued at over $20,000. The tavern featured occasional live entertainment, and weekly specials such as “Sunday nine-ball tournaments, Wednesday Night Slow-Pitch BBQ in the beer patio, Friday Night "wing night" with tricycle races and more!” Ten guest rooms on the second floor, two of which were suites, had been modernized with full bathrooms, new windows and air conditioning. The hotel’s third floor had not been renovated in 2006.

The King George Hotel, Melville, 2006. Joan Champ photo

The kitchen of the King George Hotel, Melville, 2006.

On February 17, 2010, the King George Hotel was destroyed by a suspicious fire that started in the kitchen. Sam Pervez, who had purchased the hotel only a few weeks before, intended to do more renovations to the 100-year-old building. A resident and former owner of the historic King George Hotel pleaded guilty to setting the fire. “I didn’t like the way things happened there,” the 63-year-old Roland St. Amand told the court. Several hundred people gathered to watch the firefighters battle the blaze. One of the on-lookers shot this video:

Watch more video of Melville's main street before the hotel fire, August 2008: YouTube link

Tuesday, 22 February 2011

The Franklin Hotel, Assiniboia, burned down on December 16, 2008. Photo by Landon Ullrich

Another small-town Saskatchewan hotel went up in flames this past weekend. Carol MacCallum, the owner of the Choiceland hotel and bar, vows to rebuild the hotel. “This is a great town, these are great people” MacCallum told the Saskatoon StarPhoenix. “They need a bar. The bar is a community centre.”

Many hotels that once commanded the corners of Railway and Main have burned to the ground over the years. It didn’t take much – a live cinder drawn up the chimney by a strong wind and igniting the flat tar roof; the explosion of a coal oil stove – to set these rambling old wooden buildings ablaze.

Queen’s Hotel fire, Macrorie, 1957.

From Jubilee Reminiscences:

A History of Macrorie (1957)

Hotel fires caused death and destruction. In 1912, the hotel in Antler, Saskatchewan, caught fire after an explosion of the gas works which provided the building’s light and heat. According to the town’s history book (1983), the guests in the front part of the hotel escaped unharmed, but it was a different story for staff members in the back of the building. “Two chambermaids were saved by the Chinese cook, who forcibly threw these two frightened girls over the hole, and they escaped unhurt. Dan Morrison, who was also in the back part, had his hair and face badly burnt. Fred Brown, a man of German descent, a carpenter and resident of the hotel, died in this event. He was found with his mattress still under him; evidently he died of smoke inhalation, never waking. They had held a birthday party for him the day before the fire.”

One of the most tragic hotel fires in Saskatchewan’s history occurred in Macoun on a windy April day in 1914. Thirteen people died and many were injured when an acetylene lighting plant in the hotel basement exploded. It was lunch time, and the hotel dining room was filled to capacity. The owner’s son smelled gas and decided to go down to the basement to investigate – with a lit cigar in his mouth. As soon as he opened the basement door, the place exploded. The entire building was thrown about thirty feet in the air, and then crashed back down. The young man with the cigar survived with only a few bruises, singed hair and eyebrows. Everyone else caught in the conflagration – save two – perished in the fire, or died later as a result of their injuries.

In the early days, few of Saskatchewan’s small towns had the means to extinguish the flames of a big fire. A disastrous hotel fire prompted many a town council to buy firefighting equipment. Other town passed bylaws mandating the construction of firewalls between adjacent buildings. Roofs had to be made of incombustible materials. The front verandas and covered balconies that once graced most old hotels had to be removed as they added to the fire hazard. In 1933, the town of Radville passed a bylaw forcing every hotel to provide fire escapes, signs leading to theses escapes, fire extinguishers on each floor, and a rope for each guest room. The minute book of the town of Webb records Hotel Bylaw No. 19: “Every public hotel shall be provided with one cotton rope at least three-quarter inch in diameter to be firmly fastened at least two feet above the windowsill in each bedroom.”

Firefighting demonstration, Comstock Hotel, Halbrite, n.d.

Plowshares to Pumpjacks(1984)

Not everyone was sad to see the town hotel burn down. When the women of Clavet heard that the hotel was on fire in 1915 - the year Prohibition was introduced in Saskatchewan, it is reported they said, "Hell is burning."

About Me

One of my favorite activities was traveling around the southern half of Saskatchewan with my digital camera. My favorite photo subjects were old small-town hotels. I am the former the Executive Director of the Saskatchewan Western Development Museum.

Acknowledgements

I could not write this blog without the local history books from all the little villages and towns throughout the province. I am indebted to the web site, Our Roots, for digitizing many Saskatchewan local history books, and to the libraries that preserve these rich resources on their book shelves.

I am sorry that Google News Archives is no longer searchable. It still provides free access to scanned newspapers, including full issues of the major Saskatchewan papers, going back to the 1800s, but it no longer has a search engine. You have to browse, which is not really practical for my research purposes.

“I stayed in a really old hotel last night. They sent me a wake-up letter.”